Mastodawn

Dr Zoyander Street

Instead of defending the use of LLMs for polishing up your writing, we could be advocating for unpolished writing. Blog posts with spelling errors and awkwardly repeated words. Emails that sound a bit less warm and professional because you forgot the preamble of "Apologies for the late reply, hope you're well! Thanks for the thing last week".

If there's no budget for a human editor, why should the text meet a "professional" (middle class, formally educated) standard? Dyslexic people can just write how they write and people can deal with it. Autistic people can just say what they mean to say and not waste energy on the double empathy gap.

We can learn to read for a more inclusive world, instead of wasting the planet's diminishing resources masking our differences.

Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)Feb 21

@zoy this is what I always think too!

Michael J. Coffey Feb 21

@zoy There are also lots of people who have proofreading/editing skills who are happy to help out if it's a special piece or from an author who is struggling or whatever. Like, most of us don't want to be taken advantage of, but like, gimme an actual cookie and I'm happy to proof while I eat it (or whatever)

Marianne Feb 21

@michaelc @zoy this! I'm always happy to help friends look over a difficult email/letter or hepp write something. My partner hates writing to businesses and such so we do that together.

It's just yet another opportunity to connect with other people and share talents to help out that's squandered.

Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶Feb 21

@zoy @da5nsy
I teach academic writing to uni students. One of the things I talk about is the level needed for different types of work. I point out that their exercises for me will only be read by an audience of one (me). BUT I'm training them to write well for a much larger audience. When you want/hope hundreds or more will read your work, then not editing it properly is pushing the work of figuring it out onto all those readers, rather than the one writer. Aimed at one reader, rough is fine.

Dr Zoyander Street Feb 21

@a_cubed @da5nsy Certainly, learning to write clearly and effectively is incredibly valuable and worthwhile. At the same time, learning to read unclear, opaque texts is another valuable part of education. Imagine if this was extended to reading across differences of culture, disability, class, etc.

@a_cubed @zoy @da5nsy
I think you are over-simplifying. A university paper aimed at a few hundred people needs to look way more professional than a twitter post read by thousands.

Seth Rutledge Feb 21

@a_cubed @zoy @da5nsy depends on the culture too. In the West, it is the responsibility of the speaker. In Japan, comprehension is much more the responsibility of the listener. We should not assume our way is universal or correct simply because it is how we were raised.

cev/briar/fox Feb 21

@a_cubed @zoy @da5nsy I would encourage you to consider how chatgpt determines the register/style to correct your writing to fit into. how well does it actually do that? and also, if you use chatgpt to do it, you never learn the skill of writing for specific audiences yourself. and finally, who decides what standard we are trying to assimilate to?
I think its important to unpack the prescriptivist mindset as well, e.g. think about this in terms of code switching rather than correctness.

"we could be advocating for unpolished writing"

There is a wonderful true story by @WeirdWriter which does this beautifully:

https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/

The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

A fabulously gay blind author.

Mastodon Migration Feb 21

@FediThing @zoy @WeirdWriter

☝️ Such a great and memorable piece.

Giacomo Tesio Feb 21

@FediThing@chinwag.org

mid way, and I love it so much I can't wait but thank you for sharing.

@zoy@merveilles.town @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social @tiotasram@kolektiva.social

Robert Kingett Feb 21

@giacomo @FediThing @zoy @tiotasram Thank you for reading! The audio version is actively being recorded at the moment, but just in case you haven’t come across my blog previously, I write nonfiction and fiction. I have a podcast with narrations of my blog posts for those that are illiterate or choose not to read, but you can learn about me and the things I write at https://sightlessscribbles.com/about/

About Sightless Scribbles and about Robert Kingett, Sightless Scribbles

A fabulously gay blind author.

Loki Laufeyiarson Feb 21

@WeirdWriter it's a wonderful piece. As a musician, it hits me. I felt the anger of being alone in a room of people thinking easy digesting is better then having to chew.

Ada Swordlace Feb 21

@FediThing @zoy @WeirdWriter oh wow this is something special. and real.

reading this was cool water in the desert sun

Robert Kingett Feb 21

Thank you! I hope my feed makes it to your reader, but for an intro to everything that is me and the blog, https://sightlessscribbles.com/about/ @swordlace @FediThing @zoy

About Sightless Scribbles and about Robert Kingett, Sightless Scribbles

A fabulously gay blind author.

@FediThing @zoy @WeirdWriter I just finished this masterful piece of work. I was supposed to take a nap but forgot I was drowsy after the first paragraph! Ironically enough, this is a galaxy away from "unpolished work". Thank you *a lot* for that link.

Robert Kingett Feb 21

@quiou HAH! Thank you! In truth, there are spelling and grammar errors in there, like with my wrong use of the em dash, and someone pointed out my "whine" VS "wine" and I corrected that in early January but thank you! :) I hope my feed makes it to your reader at some point. https://sightlessscribbles.com/about/

About Sightless Scribbles and about Robert Kingett, Sightless Scribbles

A fabulously gay blind author.

@WeirdWriter the points you allude to are mere details, really 🙂 I'm seriously thinking about including your blog in my feed (need to choose an rss feeder before that) 😁

Robert Kingett Feb 21

hah! Thank you! I also offer ways to get the posts via email, too, just go to my /follow page, but I personally use Miniflux, but I've been hearing fantastic things about https://artemis.jamesg.blog/features @quiou

Artemis: A calm web reader

Artemis is a calm web reader.

@WeirdWriter No worries 🙂 I''ll use rss, thanks 🙂

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@zoy 'instead of accommodations we should just eliminate the role of grammar in class distinction.' this is my least favourite leftism (and I'm a socialist). no reform, only radical change allowed! people asking for incremental accommodations are traitors to the revolution!

making writing accessible to all is one of the very few good things about LLMs. let the unconfident writers polish their prose and let's target the financial and environmental and industrial injustice and unsustainability of 'AI' directly.

@onekind Except that llms aren't making writing accessible to all. They take what you wrote in the first place, bleach its meaning, eliminate your voice and leave you with a bland, mostly meaningless, and bloated string of words that nobody wants to read. They are a way of keeping people from learning to express themselves. Why do you think style and a certain register are signifiers of class? They signal you had the time to hone those skills.

Dmitry Tantsur Feb 21

@dimllychlyngarw @onekind @zoy this is just a dump of your favorite stereotypes about LLM.

If you suddenly want your point to be understood by a varied audience, including people who may be prejudiced against you, you have no option than to polish it. If you cannot do it (e.g. because you're not a native speaker) and cannot afford paying for it, LLMs are your next best choice.

"Let's accept imperfect texts" is a great idea but wishful thinking in reality. Try it with your big boss.

@creepy_owlet Is it? Or are you just flouting your lack of understanding of texts and writing?

If you can't express your point (well enough) in a certain language, how can you know that whatever an llm spits out actually represents your point? And why would you "suddenly" be in that specific position?

I haven't seen a perfect text in my entire life. And I've never written one. My bosses haven't, either. So yeah, everybody around me accepts imperfect texts
@onekind

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@dimllychlyngarw @creepy_owlet the word you were looking for is 'flaunting.'

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@dimllychlyngarw @zoy some do. that's mostly an effect of ChatGPT's business model not an inherent property of LLMs.

I also never claimed they make 'writing accessible to all.'

Grammar signifies class because an emergent bourgeois in England and the UK needed a claim to respectable nobility that wasn't based on aristocratic lineage and sent their kids to grammar schools. Learn some history?

Mre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

I'd really recommend you read the Sightless Scribbles piece that's been linked a couple of times in the thread. It lays out the issues a lot better than I ever could.

@onekind @zoy writing was already accessible to all if you don’t apply unreasonable and unnecessary standards.

LLMs are not accessible to all. They incur dependency on one of a handful of massive mostly-US corporations. And prices are almost certainly going to start increasing because current prices are artificially low and insufficient to cover operating costs (presumably in order to inflate adoption rates).

LLMs aren’t a socialist solution in the slightest.

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@benjamineskola @zoy wow that's some interesting tense work. 'was already' sounds like 'is' right up until you jam in the 'if' that begs the question i was posing.

writing is open to anyone but writing *accessibly to others* is difficult. I love the idea that we should all tolerate unconventional writing right up until I remember that *readers also need to be able to understand it.*

I am pretty fucking sure my toot made it clear I'm not pro-LLM and even laid out the bases for a socialist critique of them so maybe stop putting words in my mouth.

@onekind You did, indeed, say "it's one of the very few good things about LLMs", not that LLMs as a whole are good. But I disagree: it's not a good thing about LLMs. It's the opposite of a solution to the problem; it makes the problem worse.

Even if LLMs aided communication, they do so at the cost of increased dependency on US tech corporations (or, at best, non-US tech corporations).

And I don't agree even that they do aid communication. Inserting a text generator in between a writer and a reader is the opposite of communication.

(And I didn't put words in your mouth.)

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@benjamineskola You wrote 'LLMs aren’t a socialist solution in the slightest,' negating something I never claimed, and that's putting words in my mouth.

Yet again an 'if' that concedes my point only to argue things *should* be otherwise. Yes they should, but they are not anywhere near close to being that way.

You're missing something important in your critique of LLMs: there are thousands of them, some are open source, many will run on your own hardware, and many can be prompted regarding tone and style. There is nothing inherently American or even capitalist about GPT or LLMs per se. The tech can be used in prosocial and pro-socialist ways, on multiple sides of struggle.

@onekind OK, a few things: first, no, that's not putting words in your mouth. I am asserting that, if someone thought LLMs are compatible with socialism, they'd be wrong. (As it stands in the present moment.)

As for the 'things should be otherwise', well, yes. We are socialists; the whole point is that we want things to be otherwise. I don't think it makes sense to draw some lines and insist that this particular thing can't be changed, when we're already demanding fundamental changes in economic and social arrangements.

As for the point about 'open-source' LLMs: that doesn't actually avoid the problem. They aren't actually open-source, and training the weights requires the same intensive process as is done for the closed-source LLMs. Nobody can do that without millions of dollars to burn, and the existing ones all depend on the training done by those same corporations. Better/fuller explanation: https://hachyderm.io/@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange/116107854327461213

I do agree that in a socialist society the technology itself could potentially exist and be used without contradiction. But in the real world, in the present, the only possible usage of LLMs entail that dependency on capital.

Hachyderm.io

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@benjamineskola There is nobody else in this conversation; negating a claim imputes it to me.

And it's pointless to assert an ought without any sense of the weight massed against it or any realistic program for change.

Which you tacitly acknowledge because you're making exactly the same argument back to me — that there's no point asserting any prosocial or socialist angle to LLMs because of path dependency and their deeply embedded capitalist origins. Audre Lord, the master's tools, etc.

There is absolutely nothing to stop a government somewhere deciding to train up a model on a more multicultural corpus. The technology is not inherently one thing or another. The implementations we've seen to date have come out of a particular corporate conjuncture but that governs their present not the future. As noted by Foucault — the great scholar of the otherwise — power is always exercised in struggle and remains constantly in danger of reversal.

And the monetary expense of doing so is absolutely nothing compared to the difficulty of changing every aspect of social existence in which literacy implies class credibility and cultural capital. I do behaviour change for a living and it is a slow grind getting people to adopt even things that will benefit them.

Anyway it's 3AM here so I'm going to leave you to it. Thanks for the chat.

Marianne Feb 21

@onekind @zoy it's not polishing, it's homogenising.

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@noodlemaz @zoy I have some news for you about copy editing.

Marianne Feb 21

@onekind @zoy uh if that's what you think the point of that job is, well, I hope that's not what you do.

Daniel Reeders Feb 21

@noodlemaz @zoy Unless they are Ezra 'make it new' Pound, copy editors conventionalise writing according to implicit house styles and explicit style guides. They make writing more accessible by doing it. If someone isn't writing in a context where they have access to a copy editor, an LLM can assist. But apparently we'd be better off shaming those writers while simultaneously telling them to be proud of their flaws.

@zoy I agree. Also, AI isn’t making people’s writing better. It’s making it so bland and generic as to be completely unreadable.

@zoy
I have a coworker that seems yo have forgotten how to think for themselves and responds to most things by first having AI write it for them.

Its so clear to us all that its AI not them lol

Jo - pièce de résistance Feb 21

@zoy YES!!! Much preferred to burning the world down to garble stolen expertise, to appear ‘nice’.

it's B! Cavello 🐝Feb 21

@zoy I feel like you might enjoy https://multimodal.art/manifesto/

anti-ai art manifesto

Mastodon Migration Feb 21

A relative recently was going on about how much she liked ChatGPT because she had always felt her birthday and Christmas cards were awkward and now they are 'smooth as glass.'

@zoy autistic writing can be coherent or not, long or short, but it always means something
Chatbot writing is long and coherent, but ultimately says nothing at all
I would rather not waste my time reading bullshit that has nothing to tell me, personally

Big Kumera Energy Feb 21

@zoy I *did* read all of Feersum Endjinn because I wanted to hear what the author had to say. Maybe a little less polish would be nice. We're supposed to be into authenticity now, right?

Luci Bitchface Angerfoot Feb 21

@zoy cool idea in theory. frequently leads to me eating lots of shit in practice

Furthering Feb 21

@zoy I work with writers who are not native speakers. These days, I sincerely cheer them on when they have the courage and determination to express themselves without using the LLM crutch even when they know they'll make errors. Bring on the quirks and the correct-adjacent phrasing. There's so much humanity in it, and I find it absolutely beautiful.

Jennifer C J Radtke Feb 21

@Furthering @zoy It is beautiful. When I read emails etc from people I know well, I hear it in their voice, with their accent. It would be very disconcerting to read something from them that didn't match how they speak. That would particularly be the case for communications that are really about relationships, rather than imparting information - congratulations, commiserations, seeing how folk are doing. We absolutely _need_ the humanity of our individual expression.

Furthering Feb 21

@RadtkeJCJ @zoy 100% this. Even when I'm correcting for clarity or grammar, I want to make sure that the person's voice remains.

An individual voice is becoming increasingly more precious.

Mre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

@RadtkeJCJ @Furthering @zoy Plus, maybe I'm a freak but sometimes I like to struggle a bit with a text.

I have a notepad held onto my copy of Sacred Games with a rubber band, where I wrote notes on all the unfamiliar slang terms and references. It's taken me much longer than usual to read it, but so much atmosphere and tone would be lost without it! If all that was stripped out, it wouldn't be Mumbai noir anymore, it'd just be noir set in Mumbai, and not nearly as interesting or fun to read. (And clearly there's plenty of agreement that it's a good novel, since it got a Netflix series.)

Furthering Feb 21

@dartigen @RadtkeJCJ @zoy

Doesn't sound freak-like to me at all. If a book doesn't challenge me and teach me new words, new ways of looking at the world, and various expressions, what's it for?

This is one reason I have a hard time with many, many books published in the past few years. It's just so much literary pablum.

I'm partial to this N+1 editorial, which asks us to learn to distinguish between LLM output and human writing:

"Notice the poverty of the latter’s [LLM output's] style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing."

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/

Charm, surprise, and strangeness -- give me that a million times over. Charm, surprise, and strangeness. Please.

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.

n+1

Mre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

@Furthering @RadtkeJCJ @zoy Also the format flattening - I don't have a ton of examples of books where the typography is an important part of the story itself or equally as meaningful as the content off the top of my head, but the one that always comes to mind is House of Leaves. (I think some of the Lemony Snickett novels did some interesting things with typography as well. I haven't had a chance to read a lot of others that do much with the typography that I can recall as standing out to me. Though some of the adventure novels I read as a kid that included a lot of puzzles definitely used some special typography to make those work. And ofc Discworld using font changes to convey some particular character voices.

From what I've seen a lot of LLMs tend to flatten formatting when fed text. Or they don't like it and won't parse the text at all. And I'm sure that comes across as 'don't do that' to less confident writers using LLMs, just as much as the flattening of the content of the text is discouraging.

Furthering Feb 21

@dartigen This is an aspect I hadn't thought about/been aware of. The first book that comes to mind with imaginative formatting is The Raw Shark Texts!

Mre. Dartigen [maker mode]Feb 21

@Furthering I'm not sure if all LLMs do it or are as bad for it, but the fact that I've been told twice now in as many months by different employment consultants to not use any kind of formatting beyond font size and bullet points in my resume (so aesthetically it looks *awful*) because LLMs can't parse text in a table or in columns does not make me confident that it's gotten any better or going to get any better.

(Again, might be some of my spicy brain showing, but as much as I know resumes need to be easily readable and short, I also appreciate a well-presented and aesthetically pleasing document. Makes it more memorable as well. But I guess humans don't read resumes anymore.)

Furthering Feb 21

@dartigen Oh, that makes complete sense!

@Furthering @dartigen The first one I thought of is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”. 1759, so also probably the first chronologically.

That’s a moray Feb 21

@Furthering @zoy I've been in EFL for almost 30 years and have grappled with LLM submissions for most of those. Most of my students are also learning against their will. So the past 5 years or so I stopped grading grammar. I fix egregious errors, but if my students have made their intent clear they get the score. In turn they often feel less hesitant to try, which had a much bigger impact on their learning than any explanations about where to put participles ever could.

Furthering Feb 21

@Bumblefish @zoy Yep, I'm working with professional writers, but I heap on the praise when they strive to maintain their voice. I can help them clarify and correct. They respect themselves, me, and the reader enough to try as a human being, and that's wonderful.

Dataline Feb 21

@zoy Even my formally educated affluent ass finds LLM output repulsive. There is really something so grotesque about the output of a machine that doesn't have the slightest personal affectation. I am proud of my rough edges, because I'm a person. I can write "perfectly" and I have great diction. But a robot can't wax poetic or get upset the way I can. Whether someone uses polished or vulgar language, I submit I can still tell the difference between whether they used a language model to glaze me or they came to me as a person with real desires.

I do all that polite crap in my emails, and yet, no machine could predict what I'm going to say because I will never say what would be considered the most lubricious or incontrovertible thing. While I do think that learning to write well is a good thing and that education should be more universal and patient than it is, I completely agree that if we're looking for merit in a post or a submission, that it's never in how much you sound like an automatic sycophant.

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 21

@zoy This might even arise naturally, as a mechanism for identifying humans among bots. 🤔

Wayne Werner Feb 21

@zoy I like artisanal words and artisanal things.